Blue Gene


  BLUE GENE.doc.doc (Size: 3.25 MB / Downloads: 1)



Introduction
1.1 What is Blue Gene?
Blue Gene is a computer architecture project designed to produce several supercomputers, designed to reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS (petaFLOPS) range, and currently reaching sustained speeds of nearly 500 TFLOPS (teraFLOPS). It is a cooperative project among IBM (particularly IBM Rochester MN, and the Thomas J. Watson Research Center), the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the United States Department of Energy (which is partially funding the project), and academia.
Blue Gene is an IBM Research project dedicated to exploring the frontiers in supercomputing: in computer architecture, in the software required to program and control massively parallel systems, and in the use of computation to advance our understanding of important biological processes such as protein folding.
There are four Blue Gene projects in development:
Blue Gene/L
Blue Gene/C
Blue Gene/P
Blue Gene/Q.

What is a Super computer?

A supercomputer is a computer which performs at a rate of speed which is far above that of other computers. Given the constantly changing world of computing, it should come as no surprise to learn that most supercomputers bear their superlative titles for a few years, at best. Computer programmers are fond of saying that today's supercomputer will become tomorrow's computer; the computer which we are using now is probably more powerful than most historic supercomputers, for example.
Scientific organizations like NASA boast supercomputers the size of rooms for the purpose of performing calculations, rendering complex formulas, and performing other tasks which require a formidable amount of computer power. Some supercomputers have also been designed for very specific functions like cracking codes and playing chess; Deep Blue is a famous chess-playing supercomputer.
The term “supercomputer” was coined in 1929 by the New York World, referring to tabulators manufactured by IBM. To modern computer users, these tabulators would probably appear awkward, slow, and cumbersome to use. This continues to be true of supercomputers today, which harness immense processing power so that they are incredibly fast, sophisticated, and powerful.
Most supercomputers run on a Linux or Unix operating system, as these operating systems are extremely flexible, stable, and efficient. Supercomputers typically have multiple processors and a variety of other technological tricks to ensure that they run smoothly.
One of the biggest concerns with running a supercomputer is cooling. As one might imagine, supercomputers get extremely hot as they run, requiring complex cooling systems to ensure that no part of the computer fails. Another issue is the speed at which information can be transferred or written to a storage device, as the speed of data transfer will limit the supercomputer's performance.

How Do They Differ From a Personal Computer

Cost
range from $100,000s to $1,000,000s
Environment
most require environmentally controlled rooms
Peripherals
lack sound cards, graphic boards, keyboards, etc.
accessed via workstation or PC
Programming language
FORTRAN


History
Growth in Semiconductor Industry Moore’s Law :

Gordon Moore one of the cofounder of Intel corporation, visualized in the early 1970’s that chip building technology would improve very quickly. He projected that “The number of transistors on the chip would double every 18 months”.


Breif Description:
Each Compute or I/O node is a single ASIC with associated DRAM memory chips. The ASIC integrates two 700 MHz PowerPC 440 embedded processors, each with a double-pipeline-double-precision Floating Point Unit (FPU), a cache sub-system with built-in DRAM controller and the logic to support multiple communication sub-systems. The dual FPUs give each Blue Gene/L node a theoretical peak performance of 5.6 GFLOPS (gigaFLOPS). Node CPUs are not cache coherent with one another.